Second, ET couldn’t phone home. The radio seemed functional, but nobody was answering the phone call. This wasn’t surprising. The AN/PRC-77 ‘Prick 77’ radio had a range of about 8 klicks at best, ground to ground. We could reach further if there was an airborne antenna, to a plane for instance, but for now, we were at least 8 klicks away from the drop zone, and I was betting much further. He also had an AT-984 antenna which he rigged up, which doubled the range, and still couldn’t raise anybody. Then he rigged up his spool of WD-1 telephone wire as an antenna, and still didn’t get a signal.
Things started getting worse. Sergeant Briscoe returned with his little group relatively quickly, carrying a body on a makeshift stretcher. The body was covered with a torn parachute, and nobody looked happy. I looked at the men, and at the Sergeant. “Oh, shit!”
He just gave me a miserable nod. “Yes, sir.” I hobbled over and he pulled away the parachute, exposing Bob Donovan’s lifeless face. “We found him wedged against a rock. It looks like he landed wrong and snapped his neck.” He flipped the cover back over the captain.
About a half hour later the other two men came in. Private Masurski had crashed into a broken tree trunk, which had gutted him like a fish. He was dead, too. Private Smith, at least, was alive, if not exactly kicking. He had a multiple compound fracture of both the tibia and fibula in his left leg, and was barely able to hold in the screams as he was brought in. Doc took one look and shot him up with some morphine before examining him any further.
Well, we were all there, all 20 of us. Two dead, one a stretcher case, half a dozen more with strains and sprains, a sullen officer, no communications, not enough food and water, and no idea where we were. I closed my eyes for a second. Maybe I would wake up and find myself having a bad dream after a night at the Fort Bragg Officer’s Club!
I opened my eyes and found a bunch of paratroopers watching me. Time to get back to work. “Lieutenant, I want you to see to the Captain and Masurski. Briscoe, we need to do some recon.” I dug out the area maps I had been issued in regards to shooting howitzers at things, and quickly came to the conclusion we probably weren’t on the smallest scale maps. I found a larger map, showing most of Honduras and the surrounding countries. We were currently facing southward on the side of a large hill or small mountain, with a shallow valley in front of us. A small road ran through the valley below us, from left to right.
I also kept an eye on Fairfax. It was readily apparent he was clueless as to what to do. I wondered how he ended up in the 505th and chalked it up to outstanding scores in his classes at West Point. (Yes, even Hudson High has its share of idiots!) I had no doubt that if asked, Lieutenant Fairfax could give me a textbook answer about “deploying his assets to maximum effect” and “utilizing personnel to accomplish the mission” but he couldn’t actually figure out how to order his men to do something. All he knew was how to order his ranking sergeant to get something done. Briscoe glanced over at Janos and silently ordered the corporal to take a couple of men and dig out some body bags.
Fairfax faltered at the point where he had to remove the men’s dog tags and jam one into each of their mouths. To be fair, so did Janos; I doubt any of the men had ever done this for real. I limped over and knelt next to Bob Donovan, and Sergeant Briscoe knelt down next to Private Masurski. He took Masurski’s dog tag and said, “Like this, sir,” and jammed it into the dead man’s teeth.
I suppose we didn’t have to do this. I had one of their dog tags in my pocket now, and almost all of us carried extras. Like probably every man in the group, except maybe Fairfax, I had two around my neck, a third sewed into my right boot laces, and a fourth in my left rear pocket. No matter what happened to me, they’d be able to identify the pieces. Still, I knew what I had to do.
“Yeah,” I sighed, and did the same to Donovan. Several of the men made the sign of the cross. Fairfax ran to the edge of the clearing and puked up breakfast. Well, it made me a bit queasy, too. I suspected he had never seen a dead body before, even in civilian life. Still, the rest of his performance was enough to get him shitcanned from the military! I was sure that Donovan, if he had lived, would have given Fairfax an OER that would have gotten him assigned to a Port-A-Potty repair depot for the rest of his career. In Viet Nam his men would have fragged him, simply to get him out of their hair!
I looked back at my wide area map. Assuming that the pilot of the C-47 had simply gotten lost and dropped us when he figured we had gone far enough, we could be practically anywhere in Central America. If he had flown north or east, we were probably still in Honduras, but if he had flown south or west, we might well be fucked! To the south was Nicaragua, then in the hands of the Sandinistas, communist and flagrantly anti-American. To the west was El Salvador, home to a nasty multipart civil war, with most of the parties not caring for gringos all that much, either. In addition, most of the two countries had fairly active drug trades going on in the hills, and the narcos were probably as heavily armed as we were. It was like being in a bad Tom Clancy novel! It was too bad I was the only guy here who knew who Tom Clancy was. He hadn’t even started writing yet. We had to know where we were.
“Sergeant, who are the men who speak Spanish the best? Not just mas cervezas, por favor either. Guys who can speak it and read it?” I asked.
Briscoe gave me a surprised look, and scratched his head, but a couple of the men came forward. They were swarthy under their grease paint, with Hispanic features. I recognized one of the men from earlier in the morning. “Private Martinez, right? You speak Spanish?”
“Si, mi capitan!” he said, and then rattled off something else too fast for me to follow.
I looked at the other guy. “You, too? What’d he say?”
The other private said something to the Martinez, generating a big laugh, and then replied, “Private Guillermo, sir. It was something about sending officers south of the border who can’t speak Spanish.”
I snorted and laughed at that myself. “I can’t argue with that. Anybody else?” Two more men came forward, another Hispanic private named Gonzalez and Corporal Janos. I looked at Janos and said, “You speak Spanish? With a name like Janos?”
He laughed. “My father might be Polish, but he moved to Texas and married a Mexican girl from Juarez.”
“A Texas Polock? Well, now I’ve heard of everything. What about you fellows? Where are you from?” I asked the other three.
Martinez and Guillermo were Mexican American, from Arizona and California respectively. Gonzalez was from Puerto Rico by way of New York City. “Okay, my life is in the hands of three wetbacks and a Polish Texan! My mother told me I’d come to a messy end!” That got me a few laughs and even more grins. “Seriously, all of our lives are in your hands right now. More than anything else, we need to know just where the hell we are. There is a very, very good chance we aren’t in Honduras anymore. If we aren’t, we are surrounded by bad guys, either commies who hate Americanos or drug dealers who hate everybody. Got the picture?”
Suddenly the entire group got serious and silent. I continued, “You four men are going to be our scouts. I want two of you to go east and two to go west along the road and try and figure out where we are. However, I don’t want you guys seen. Until we know where we are, we can’t take a chance.”
They all nodded at that, and then Janos asked, “What if we’re still in Honduras?”
“That’s different. If we’re still in Honduras, then find a phone and get us some help! This exercise is over! However, you aren’t to do that unless you are absolutely, positively sure this is Honduras! You know, like a sign saying Welcome to Honduras! That sort of thing, got it?”